In their never-ending quest to take the politics out of politics, political reformers have a new target: the questionnaires that advocacy groups ask candidates to answer when seeking endorsements. Here's how John Diaz, editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, describes them: "Our elected officials are essentially making secret pledges to protect the status quo before they are even sworn into office."

I'm supposed to be shocked. But I've been part of the endorsement game most of my career: first, as an editorial page editor whose duties included organizing the endorsement process for my newspaper; and later, in 2006, as policy director for Phil Angelides's campaign for California governor, where I oversaw the answering of endorsement questionnaires. The reality, in my experience, is more complex and less smutty than the reformers imagine.

Imagine yourself a candidate. Before you can do all the great things you intend to do in office, you have to win an election. And to win a majority of votes you first have to gather enough public attention, volunteers, and money.

Assembling those resources requires you to woo political constituencies. American politics is a story of groups and has been since before 1835 when Alexis de Tocqueville described a nation of joiners in Democracy in America. And what do these political groups want out of you, the candidate? They want to communicate their vision of the public interest to you. They want to help you if they think it will advance their cause, and defeat you if they think you oppose their ideas and interests.

The questionnaires that so appall reformers are just one piece—along with personal meetings, speeches, and interviews—of advocates' efforts to get to know you. The questionnaires are often broad and detailed on policy and intrusive on matters of campaign finance and strategy—in other words, a lot like the questions I used to ask candidates as a journalist. When I ended up on the other side of the table, answering the questionnaires on behalf of a candidate, I was impressed by how seriously advocacy groups take their endorsement responsibility.

The questionnaires also teach the candidate. You learn what politically active citizens care about. Over and over, our campaign learned about issues we'd never heard of. To answer the questionnaires well, we had to dig into the complexity of problems, talk to people whose knowledge we'd not previously tapped, and consider tradeoffs between various solutions.

Because there are always tradeoffs. The biggest thing you learn as a candidate, if you didn't know it before, is you can't tell every public group whose support you covet what it wants to hear. If you support the Western States Petroleum Association on fracking, you'll find it hard to win over environmental groups. So you agree with groups where you can, respectfully disagree where you can't, and try to craft a single message that might resonate across opposing factions—such as Bill Clinton's declaration that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. To any rational advocacy organization (and not all of them are rational), backing a winning candidate who supports half of its agenda is a better choice than supporting a true believer who's a certain loser.

If this process is so benign, I can hear the reformers ask, why are the questionnaires secret? The answer: No candidate trusts that a questionnaire is secret. People in politics talk, cut and paste (and forward) emails, and even send faxes. You have to assume that anything you put in a questionnaire can, and might, end up in the papers or an opponent's attack ads.

What would change if reformers were to get their way and candidates were to be required to disclose their answers to advocacy groups' endorsement questions? The most likely result is the one that has followed from disclosure requirements in public records laws: less communication would be committed to the page. The written questionnaires would disappear or be reduced to pap, leaving the courtship to what the reformers of the last century called "smoke-filled rooms."

And with them would disappear a lot of learning.

Mark Paul was formerly deputy editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee, deputy treasurer of California, and policy director of the 2006 gubernatorial campaign of Phil Angelides. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.